Personal Power and Power Drains
Aug 08, 2022
I hesitate to use the word “power” here. It seems hackneyed, like we are going back to the eighties. Power ties, power lunches, power suits. The last thing I want to sound like is one of those motivational speaker types telling you to find the power within. So accept my disclaimer. But pop psychology apologies notwithstanding, power is an important topic in work and in life. You can’t live without it. You are designed to have it in the form of self-control. When you lose that and are controlled by others, you are rendered powerless.
And that is when the slippery slope that disintegrates life and causes you to lose your boundaries appears. What we know about the human experience of powerlessness is that it erodes functioning in all of the areas that are important to being an integrated person: your emotions, your relationships, and your performance. Decades of research have shown that the degree of powerlessness that people feel directly correlates with diminished functioning. And for powerlessness to occur, there must be a crack–a fault in the foundation.
The crack in the armor ends up in the disintegrated life. The crack was the weak spot someone may have for feeling guilty and over-responsible. Whether the pressure is from the fear of overidentifying with how bad someone is going to feel if she fires him, or someone who allows their boss to make them feel bad, or someone who has the inability to say no and therefore becomes scatterbrained. These situations can occur only if there is a soft spot in the character, a whole in the fence, a vulnerability through which people lose control of themselves. If the soft spot were not there, power losses could not happen.
Without a personal weak spot, power losses cannot happen.
Personal power, which is the beginning of the accumulation of any other kind of power, is about separateness, containment, defining yourself, setting limits, living out values, having self-control and freedom, and it must be maintained, not subject to power losses. It is only through having these kinds of personal power that you will be able to build financial power, emotional power, relational power, political power, spiritual power, and the power to perform. You are powerful when you possess the ability to do the following:
- Experience yourself as separate and differentiated from others.
- Contain destruction and keep it from spreading.
- Define yourself and know who you are.
- Set limits when needed.
- Possess and live out values.
- Have self-control and thereby be free and autonomous.
Notice that power over other people is not on the list. You can only control yourself, and when you do that well, you will do well with others.
So, under what circumstances, where, and with whom do you lose your power? Where do you tend to see the cracks where powerlessness can take root? Where are the holes in your fences?
To the degree that you can be honest about that question, you will be able to get on the road to integrating your life and keeping your boundaries. But you have to be honest. If you are not, you are more vulnerable than you know. When you deceive yourself, you are in trouble and don’t even know it.
Identify the holes in your fences
So let’s get honest, at least with yourself. We’ll look at a variety of unhealthy needs, fears, inabilities, and other conditions that tear holes in our boundaries. Each description includes questions to help you identify the holes in your fences.
The Need for Security
When the immediate future looks uncertain, do you begin to give away something of yourself to maintain security? If the job market looks scary, do you take some assignment that you would not readily agree to if you had the stomach to wait it out, thereby losing control of yourself and your direction? Or, because of fear, do you take on too much work, even with clients you do not want, because you are afraid that something may go bad? I am not talking about good diligence here. I am referring to a pattern of operating out of fear.
The Need for Approval
Do you have a need for others to like you and always approve of you? When they don’t, do all of your systems begin to fire? Do you obsessed about it and worry about it throughout the day? Are you overly vigilant in wondering what someone’s opinion is of you, and if it ever seems to diminish, do you begin to dance and try to fix it until things are good again?
The Need to Be Perfect
If the possibility of something not looking good is anywhere on the screen, do you get motivated to action? While striving for excellence is a great trait, perfectionism is not. It gets you dancing around, spending time on things that are not worth spending time on, just because you cannot stand for them to be less than ideal. The need to get it right has turned into the need to have it perfect, and you spend hours and fret and stress over things that others are able to let go. As a result of your perfectionism, you are out of control.
The Need to Have Others See You as Ideal
This is the motivation to be seen in a certain light and expending lots of energy to manage your image in the eyes of others. I have seen people literally lose a month’s energy and focus because they had a small interaction with someone they deemed important that left the impression they were not as good as they desired to be perceived. They were more motivated to work on fixing that impression than they were to address things that were truly important. Do you worry and obsess about how others are perceiving you? Do you fret and lose energy or time when you think you have left a less-than-ideal impression?
The Need to Overidentify with Other People’s Problems, Pains, or Hurt
When other people are in pain, are you not able to stand it? Do you move in to rescue them from it? If you fear that confronting them might cause them pain, do you avoid the needed conversation to spare them the pain of going through it? Does their pain make it difficult for you to discipline them or make decisions that negatively impact them? I am not talking about not feeling for people. I am talking about an overidentification with others' pain that stops you from doing what you need to do.
The Need to Rescue
This is the tendency to look at someone who is not getting it done, and be too much of a helper. Are you the kind of person who cannot stand to see someone get in over his head or have more to do than he seems to be able to manage? So you go into his yard and help him clean it up. Helping others and pitching in is a good quality, but this is different. It is the continuing pattern of getting drawn in to doing things for people that they should be doing for themselves. IT is not the exception when help is needed, but a pattern of helping someone who always needs help, with things that are really not your job or responsibility.
The Fear of Being Alone or Isolated
Have you never gotten to that step of emotional independence in which being alone, at least for a while, feels good? So sometimes when it would be good for you to be alone, do you lose your direction and the objectives that are important to you just to be around people? You feel you have to go to lunch with that group or to that seminar, even when it would serve you better to stay in the office and complete something or work at home that day. You just need to be with people. You will feel too isolated if you aren’t. Or, maybe just for the sake of being on a team, you give away too much of yourself. You lose important goals because of your excessive need to be with others, when it would serve you to be alone at times.
The Fear of Conflict and Need for Harmony
Do you get really uncomfortable when there is a conflict and people are not feeling harmonious? If there is disruption in the unity or togetherness for a time, is it difficult for you to allow that to be and just sit with it? Do you quickly seek them out to fix things or restore harmony, when often it would be better to let them fret or think about it?
The Fear of Disagreement or Differing Opinions
Do you feel that having different opinions is somehow a negative thing, no matter what side of the equation you are on? When you disagree with someone, do you feel like you have done something bad or hurt their feelings in some way, just by disagreeing with them? Or, when someone disagrees with you, do you take it as meaning something other than just a different opinion, such as an indication that you are wrong or inferior or stupid, or some other personal meaning other than simply different?
The Fear of Anger
Maybe you come from a background in which there was a lot of hurtful anger, or even abuse, and have suffered at the hands of angry people. So are you extra sensitive to it, such that whenever someone is angry or even might become angry you dance to their tune and lose yourself to make sure that they are OK? Or do you avoid conflict with them, avoid saying what you think to keep them from being angry?
The Fear of Feeling Inferior
Perhaps you have never really owned your own strengths, talents, and abilities, and you are still feeling sort of inferior to others. Do you feel a little like a kid and others are all adults? Do you feel that they are smarter, better, or above you in some way? If you do, do you give away your power to whatever they want or think, and not speak up when you really do have something to contribute? Do you just fold your cards instead and defer to the “real” experts?
The Fear of Someone’s Position or Power
Sometimes we do not just give power to a person in our heads. They actually possess it in reality, like a boss. This person does have power over you in a certain sense, in that they are in control of your job. But, does the way you experience people having power over you exceed the amount of fear and respect that is normal? Does it take on the extra dimension of being able to define you, make you feel little, stupid, or powerless? As a result, do you notice that you are not yourself with someone who is over you?
The Inability to Say No
There is a power dynamic in all relationships. In the good ones, it is mutual. Each person shows up with who they are, their thoughts and opinions, wants, likes, and dislikes, and puts it out there for the other person to bump up against. That is a real relationship. But some cannot stand the force of another person’s presence, another person’s wants. They just by nature cave in. They blink first. How comfortable are you with standing up to another’s request or wishes? Can you say no? Do you fold to others’ thoughts, wants, likes, and dislikes just because to not blink is too uncomfortable? In negotiating, do you get too uncomfortable simply standing without giving in to the pressure?
The Inability to Hear “No” or Accept Limits
Sometimes it is not the tendency to back down that causes you to get out of control. I ti s the opposite. You fight and protest anytime someone says no to you or you encounter a limit or opposition. Is your problem with boundaries not that you give yours up, but that you encroach on the boundaries of others and are a control freak? Are you described by people as controlling or aggressive? Whenever you run into a boundary of anyone else and cannot be in control, do you protest and try to push them into giving in to you? Are you like a toddler having a temper tantrum and continually busting the boundaries of others? While this may have its rewards at times, it is costing you in some key relationships, and you can also see how out of control you actually are. All it takes is for someone to say no. (If you can’t answer this one, ask someone who knows you well.)
The Inability to Tolerate the Imperfection, Incompetence, Nonperformance, or Failure of Others
Do you lose yourself, your values, your emotional well-being, and stability when someone else is not doing their job? Are you the type who cannot stand nonperformance, and it makes you crazy? As a result, you lose control of yourself and act in ways that are not helpful, either to the person, or to your own goal of making it all work out well. Irresponsible people make you crazy, and as a result, you lose it and act in ways that do not help. Also, you might miss out on seeing the good parts of some people as well.
Idealization and Hero Worship
We all have people that we see as special or incredible in some way. That is a good thing. For example, if I played golf with Jack Nicklaus, my boyhood hero, I would feel like I were with a godlike figure. But sometimes when people idealize someone, for whatever reason, they cease to be a person around them. They fawn over them and give that person too much power over them, trying to please them or always get on their good side. Do you play up to the person you have put up on the pedestal, and give away much of your personhood just because you idealize them? Do you kind of lose your own brain and choices?
Lack of Internal Structure
It may not take a person or a situation to get you out of control. It may just take being awake. Are you an impulsive person by nature, a perpetual ADD type, who just cannot sit within the bounds of any limit? IF so, it is costing you. Your impulsivity–your inability to live within the limit of good structure–is taking its toll on you and/or some significant relationships to you, in and out of work. Sometimes people lose their power and effectiveness because they are out of control by nature. They are just impulsive and have never resolved that tendency.
Dependency
Are you dependent on others to help you define who you are? Do you lack a sense of personhood, and look to others for validation, approval, significance, input, thoughts, security, etc.? Maybe something has happened in your development that has left you lacking that intact feeling of being an independent person in your own right, and as a result, you are overly dependent on the judgment and input of others.
Vulnerability to Bad Conditions or Outcomes
Are you fine as long as things are going well, but, under stress, you become someone else? Do you lose yourself or withdraw and get overly stressed? You might get controlling or angry or argumentative. You might get scared and overreact in a myriad of situations, losing your best judgment and abilities. Either way, under stressful conditions, you lose ownership of your best self out of fear and anxiety. Maybe it is a loss of control or a fear of failure, but when things are not good, neither are you.
OK, if you did not identify with a least one of these needs, fears, inabilities, or conditions, then you must live in a cave, and you probably need to get out more. In other words, we all have some sorts of situations and people that get to our underbelly and turn us into less than who we want to be. Becoming aware of your pattern, knowing when you lose it, is a key step in getting better.
It is essential to address those vulnerabilities in your personality. Without doing that, the problems will continue in every context in which you find yourself. You can go from job to job, thinking that the next one will be the one that will make it all work. But just like people who go from relationship to relationship without ever looking at what they contribute to the problem are destined to repeat it, you will too if you do not look at the underlying vulnerabilities to losing your boundaries. So identify the holes in your fences and own them. Watch for them and address them.
Now that you know what boundaries are, why we need them, how structure is important to us, and weaknesses that keep tripping you up, let’s move toward the practical side of boundaries and building the structures that are going to make it all work.
